Contrapasso is the title of the debut collection of Alexandra Fössinger. She is of Italian origin and currently lives in Northern Germany. She writes mostly in English. Many of the poems included have been previously published in the UK and elsewhere, in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, The High Window, The Journal. The cover design – a black bird against a stark white background – is by Daniel Lambert, Art Director of Cephalopress, established in 2018, providing ‘a voice for the marginalised and the voiceless’.

I do not know the author, though I attended her online reading with Q&A. There she explained the background to the poems: her attempt at survival ‘after the imprisonment in the UK of someone dear to me’. This sudden loss may, in part, have coincided with the pandemic and its lockdowns: creating an incarceration for the poet too.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, contrapasso is the punishment of souls by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself. The collection is in two parts, both preceded by a quotation from Dante’s Inferno. Part 1 covers the period of imprisonment, while poems in Part 2 were written after the person’s release.

Birds for someone who cannot hear is the title of the opening poem and birds appear throughout the collection, as messengers, omens, and symbols: the blackbird frozen in shock, the thrushes in hiding, along with magpies, sparrows, sky larks, great tit, kingfishers, herons, seabirds. The second poem is titled Cell, giving us just the bare numbers:
1,
5,
3,
4,
7,
1,
and ending:
bad luck has brought
and kept you here,
and whether
you’ll walk out
or
be carried in a coffin
is also entirely
a matter of chance.

The poems are the author’s response to the sudden loss, despair, darkness, pain. We have no life apart from life apart (Sentence); How can I find dreams of oarweed and eelgrass, / bring currents to glide on, as I must, when half / of my body is entangled / on the wrong side of the sea, / how will I know when time says to dive? (Velut luna).

Fössinger has said that she ‘is mostly interested in the spaces between things, the tiny shifts in time, the overlooked, the unsaid.’ Throughout the collection, we find astute observations and statements: la vita assurda: the middle-aged couple / pushing their dog in a pram. (July); that emptiness is best hidden / by a display of tame beauty. (Ambulant).

The strongest poems are those which describe a specific situation, or which have objects as ‘animate scaffold’. The poem Ambulant is in two parts:
I
The house with the Christmas decoration,
and the magnolia tree in bloom,
and the blackbird frozen in shock,
and an ambulance parked in the front garden,
all stand completely still.
People walk by, averting their gaze,
a stoop hammered into their skin –
How many lives will they have lost before,
without ever noticing.
The orange light is beating on the windows
like rain.

Here is Fössinger’s close attention to the overlooked, effective personification, interesting use of language. Not all the poems are so securely grounded, sometimes abstraction obscures their meaning. Other poems would have benefited from being tighter, shorter. The book is a short collection of 31 poems with quite a few blank pages. Some readers might want ‘more poems’ for their ‘pounds’.

While the poems reflect the poet’s emotional and psychological response to loss and separation, she manages to maintain a careful balance: hope is not abandoned. The recurrent bird theme also provides a framework, an underlying structure. This theme returns in the short closing poem, The robin redbreast. The loved one appears in a dream, as tiny as a bird, and:

Then you grew a beak
with which to pick and sing
and transport worms and roses.

Contrapasso is a confident and authentic debut by a perceptive, astute poet. Her personal tale finds echoes in the reader’s universal story. However long and painful the journey, there can be closure and transformation.